Anthony Cummins i The Guardian är inte helt imponerad av upplägget med fyra parallella berättelser, han tycker att stora delar av romanen är ”a largely unsurprising coming-of-age tale of sexual longing and literary ambition. Auster gives us heft without density: there are few stakes in this Borgesian garden of forking paths. The hero might sleep with Amy Schneiderman or Brian Mischevski; go to Columbia or Princeton; become a basketball reporter or a movie critic; get killed in a road accident or only maimed, but the story lines cancel each other out instead of adding substance.”

”Auster’s tilt away from the stifling control of locked-room mysteries toward the hail-mary risks of interwoven shaggy-dog coming-of-age stories is rejuvenating. He returns to many of his old hobbyhorses in 4 3 2 1, but here they are restored from the level of abstract metaphor to their rightful place in the real world. […] Puns are plentiful, but they’re jokes Ferguson tells when he’s goofing around with friends, not indicators of recondite linguistic connections. And notebooks, rather than being some kind of sacred regalia, are just notebooks.”

”Nonetheless, it’s a stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. Auster’s writing is joyful, even in the book’s darkest moments, and never ponderous or showy. ‘Time moved in two directions because every step into the future carried a memory of the past,’ one of the Fergusons muses, ‘… and while all people were bound together by the common space they shared, their journeys through time were all different, which meant that each person lived in a slightly different world from everyone else.’ Auster proves himself a master of navigating these worlds, and even though all might not happen for the best in any of them, it’s an incredibly moving, true journey.”

”The concept and its resulting structure is intriguing, but Auster has stacked the deck against himself. There’s a reason why long, encyclopedic novels have multiple sets of characters who may or may not know each other, multiple settings and disparate time frames: Variation helps hold the reader’s attention, the more drastic the better. The variations in 4321 are decidedly minor key. […] These B-movie twists are entertaining to a point, less so is the lavish attention paid to the various Fergusons’ childhoods. (The book never truly achieves escape velocity into adulthood.) He loves baseball and basketball, he starts his own newspaper in middle school, he takes European history and reads classic literature. There are indices of the books he reads and the movies he watches, but with the exception of a lengthy paean to Laurel and Hardy, these are just lists.”

”But over the course of the novel, the details of Ferguson’s more or less ordinary existence are cataloged in exhaustive detail. In fact, the sheer accretion of names, dates, places and other minutiae are the chief engine of the novel. We’re filled in on the major events of American history that occur in and around Ferguson’s life. We’re told not only what books Ferguson reads, but how long Ferguson takes to read a particular book. We’re told the names of his various twentysomething roommates even though they ‘had no role to play in the story.’ […] ‘4 3 2 1”s over-inclusive spirit sometimes makes it feel very much like a particularly chatty 19th-century social novel, transposed onto the 20th.”